Bridges of Ypsilanti High

We were planning, originally, to start on a design project today in Mr. Ambrose's physics class, but that's been put off till next week - Ypsilanti High School had a snow day on Wednesday, and that pushed back other things, including a test. While I'm sure many students would prefer to work on a design project, the test really had to be given before the end of the marking period. Everything is ready to go, though, so next week we can start on the project. The students will be learning about trusses, using the physics they've learned to understand how a truss works, and then designing and building truss bridges out of toothpicks. The handout that they're going to be given will be posed on the CTOOLS site, in case any of the other Teaching Fellows want to look at it.

I did, unexpectedly, end up helping briefly in another physics class. The other physics teacher is out for a while, so her class has a substitute. The substitute doesn't have any background in physics, so during Mr. Ambrose's preparation period, we both went over there for a few minutes to help those students get started on their worksheets. I also put in a plug for the U of M tutoring - I told them that if they're having trouble, they should go to the tutoring and get help. With their regular teacher out, it would be especially useful. I can remember when I was in high school (back in the ages of stone tablets and quill pens), and we had substitutes, sometimes it was hard to learn the material. It could be very frustrating.

In Ms. Colwell's class, they're going to be having a test next week sometime. Today, they were working with radical notation. Some of them were having a little trouble figuring out problems like the square root of the square root of the square root of the square root of a variable to the power 256 - it really isn't hard once someone catches on that the square root sign is the same thing as the 1/2 exponent, which they've worked with before. Sometimes it seems notation trips up a lot of people - they take some time to really catch on to the fact that sometimes, two seemingly different things are just the same concept dressed up a little differently.